Police beat

Thursday

Nov 9, 2017 at 3:03 PM

ALEX KIENLEN

From Conway Police Department reports

As seen on TV

It was hacking, computer hacking, which prompted a call to police Monday, Nov. 6 at 1:30 p.m. asking them to meet the caller at the library. The responding officer, en route, was told by dispatch that a woman there was reporting her computer had been hacked.

As the officer arrived a young man, 18 and "visibly upset," met him out front. He had called police, he told the officer "because of an incident involving a female." With that a woman, 36, walked up, holding a small laptop. The young man had hacked her computer, she told the officer. She was "loud and visibly upset." The investigation continued.

The officer walked the pair to the counter and asked for information, at the same time working to calm the woman down, who was very loud, reminding her that they were in a library. The woman showed the officer the screen of the laptop and pointed to icons along its bottom. These were, the woman told the officer "hacking programs" the man had been using against her.

The officer looked, noting the icons were for such things as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox - routine computer software. He told the woman this. She responded, telling him the man had hacked her computer, using his skills to steal her personal information, including financial information, again becoming loud.

The officer was not able to quiet her, and they walked to a nearby room so as not to disrupt the patrons. There the woman sat down, determined to prove to the officer the hacking that was taking place, opening various program windows on the computer, even the DOS prompt. While doing so she showed the officer a banner in one of the program windows, the banner having the man’s name on it. The officer asked the man how his name got on the woman’s laptop and the man got very quiet, the officer reported.

If he could just show the officer the computer, he said, he could explain everything. The woman countered with "He isn’t showing you anything, arrest him." The officer noted here the young man appeared frustrated. The officer asked to search the man’s backpack to see if there were hacker tools in there, and the man agreed. The officer searched, finding nothing but books in the backpack.

The woman continued that the man had committed a crime of stealing personal information with his hacking skills. She was a nurse, she told the officer, and among the things he had stolen was patient medical records. Medical privacy laws as they were, the officer responded, she may have broken the law by having patient medical records on a personal computer. The woman, meanwhile, kept scrolling through the laptop for evidence of the young man’s hacking program. She remained loud and agitated and with this in mind the officer called for assistance. A second officer arrived. The reporting officer had the second officer stay with the woman while he took the young man - who had been relatively quiet throughout the event - aside to speak with him privately.

The young man told him he was doing some work on his computer in the library when the woman walked up to him. She knew he was hacking her computer, she told him, and wanted to see his computer. "No," he replied, so she grabbed his computer from him.

The laptop she was currently scrolling through, the one she was holding when she met the reporting officer, was the young man’s computer.

The officer returned to the woman. "Is that your computer?" he asked.

"He stole it," she replied, nodding to the young man.

He asked the young man if that was his computer she was scrolling through. It was, he replied.

The woman admitted she asked to see the young man’s computer, and when he said "No" she took it. She then, the officer reported, began screaming that the officer needed to take the computer and enter it into evidence. The officer said he would not, that he would be returning the computer to its rightful owner. This raised the woman’s ire all-the-more, and she yelled the computer had been used for a crime.

The officer took the computer from her and gave it to the young man.

This made the woman angrier still, telling the officer she would contact "her detectives," giving the officer two names. She was not going to give the officer her computer, which had been hacked, because it had patient records on it, she told the officer - loudly.

The man, computer in tow, left the library. The woman insisted a report of the matter be made, and so it was.

Creep

A woman called police Tuesday Nov. 7 at 12:55 p.m. about her being harassed. The reporting officer went to the scene, an apartment complex, and spoke with the woman who called.

She was being followed and harassed, the woman said, giving the officer the name of the man who was doing so. She told the officer she worked at the apartment, and one of her jobs was to go around the apartment and put up eviction notices.

When she would do so the man would follow her, she said, then follow her to the apartment office. He would, and had repeatedly, asked her if she wanted to come back to his apartment and see his rap videos. The man had mental issues for which he had a occasional caretaker, she told the officer.

He had not done anything inappropriate, but she was worried about the man’s erratic behavior, which made her nervous, she told the officer.

The officer tracked the man down and told him not to follow the woman around, and only to speak to her about apartment complex related business.

The officer gave the woman his contact information and explained the warrants process to her, the report concluded.

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